This blog is sometimes about my second real library job, and sometimes about other stuff.

Monday, April 09, 2007

The day before

Today is the day before I start my new job. Apparently the first day and a half is all orientation, which I'm assuming will be somewhat generic - I don't expect to learn much about the job itself in those first couple of days.

So what do I know about the job? I know the point of the job is to get academics integrating the library into their research and teaching. The first point under "Duties" in my job description is to "Represent the library and act as its ambassador to its stakeholders", which is kind of cool inasmuch as it's what I was doing naturally at my last job. The whole "abassador" thing I really enjoyed.

At this stage I feel as though I have an idea of what the job entails in a big picture sense, but not in a day to day sense. What, for example, will be my first task? Do I pick an academic from my assigned faculty, call them, and say "Hi, I'm so-and-so, can we talk?" Maybe so - and again, I'm perfectly happy with that. All those years cold calling people in market research turned out to be great training after all!

Will my days be full of paperwork, planning, or meetings? How often will I be at my desk - most of the time, or rarely? I found that I was spending more and more time in my last job writing reports - will I be doing that here?

Looking again at the job description (and trying to wade through the management speak) I suspect there will be a lot of meetings - the "principal accounabilities" all seem to be about meeting with other people. Words like "informing" "contributing" "referring" all imply face to face and written communication.

I'm really curious to what extent I'll be working with the rest of my team. Will we have team meetings? Do we have team goals? Will I work directly with any of them? I know, for example, that one of the faculties will have two Outreach Librarians assigned to them, but I don't think I've been assigned to that faculty.

I already know two of the members of my team - people I've done other library land stuff with before. Do other people know each other too? I'm really curious if there are other team members that I know, but I don't know who they are yet. Ugh, that was a really clunky sentence, but you get the point.